Lights Out

by Douglas Clegg

  And when they did…

  Ellen imagined Mama Neeson kissing the bruised cheek of her little girl, tears in her squinty eyes, tears of joy for having children to love.

  Behind her, someone opened the door.

  Stood there.

  Waiting for her to turn around.

  “Look who I found,” Frank said, dragging Joey behind him into the women’s room.

  Two weeks later, she was on the train again with Joey, but it was better weather—snow had melted and the sun was exhaustingly bright.

  Frank was dead.

  She could think it.

  She could remember the feel of the knife in her hands.

  Frank had come at Joey with his own toy dump truck. She had grabbed a kitchen knife—as she’d been planning to do since Frank had hauled them back to Springfield.

  She had gone with the knowledge of what she would have to do to keep Frank out of her little boy’s life forever.

  Then, she had just waited for his temper to flare.

  She kept the knife with her, and when she ran in the living room to see Frank slamming the truck against Joey’s scalp, she let the boiling blood and rage take her down with them.

  The blade went in deep.

  She could not stop stabbing her husband.

  She lifted her son in her arms as she stepped off the train, careful on the concrete because there was still some ice.

  Joey, wrapped in a blanket, sunglasses on his face, “sleeping,” she told the nice lady who had been sitting across from them; Ellen, also wearing sunglasses and too much make-up, a scarf around her head, a heavy wool sweater around her shoulders, exhausted and determined.

  Joey’s not dead. Not really.

  It hadn’t been hard to track down the Neesons. She had called them before she got on the train, and they were not surprised to hear from her.

  “It happens this way,” Mama Neeson told her. “Our calling.”

  Ellen was not sure what to make of that comment, but she was so tired and confused that she let it go.

  Later, she might think that something of the Neesons had perhaps rubbed off on her and her son. That, perhaps just meeting them might be like inviting something into life that hadn’t been considered before.

  Something under your fingernails.

  She carried Joey to the payphone and dropped a coin in; she dialed the number from memory.

  “Mr. Neeson?”

  “Here already?” he asked.

  “I took an early train.”

  “Mama’s still asleep. She was up all night. Worries, you know. Upset for you.”

  “Well…”

  “I’ll be down there in a few minutes,” he said. “You’re sure this is what you want?”

  “Love beyond choosing,” she reminded him.

  A spool of white thread fell from Joey’s blanket, bouncing once, twice as it hit the floor, unraveling as it rolled.

  Underworld

  We were subletting the place on Thirty-Third Street, just down from Lexington Avenue—it was not terribly far from my job across from Madison Square Garden, where I was an ink-stained drudge by day before transforming into a novelist by night.

  Jenny was getting day work on the soap operas; nothing much, just the walk-on nurses and cocktail waitresses that populate daytime television, never with more than a word or two to say, so it was a long way to her Screen Actors Guild card. But she made just enough to cover the rent, and I made just enough to cover everything else, plus the feeble beginnings of a savings account that we affectionately named The Son’ll Come Out Tomorrow, because at about the time we opened the account, Jenny discovered that she was pregnant. This worried the heck out of me, not for the usual reasons, such as the mounting bills, and the thought that I might not be able to pursue writing fulltime, at least not in this life, but because of a habit Jenny had of sleeping with other men.

  It will be hard to understand this, and I don’t completely get it myself, but I loved Jenny in a way that I didn’t think possible. It wasn’t her beauty, although she certainly had that, but it was the fact that in her company I always felt safe and comfortable. I did not want to ever be with another woman as long as I lived; I suppose a good therapist would go on and on about my self-image and self-esteem and self-whatever, but I’ve got to tell you, it was simply that I loved her and that I wanted her to be happy. I didn’t worry if I was inadequate or unsatisfying as a lover, and she never spoke openly about it with me. I was just aware she’d had a few indiscretions early in our marriage, and I assumed that she would gradually, over the years, calm down in that respect. I felt lucky to have Jenny’s company when I did, and when I didn’t, I did not feel deprived. I suppose that until you have loved someone in that way it is impossible to understand that point of view.

  So I wondered about the paternity of our child, and this kept me up several nights to the point that I would slip out of bed quietly (for Jenny often had to be up and out the door by five a.m.), and go for long walks down Third Avenue, or down a side street to Second, sometimes until the first light came up over the city. During one of these jaunts, in late January, I noticed a curious sort of building—it was on a block of Kip’s Bay that began in an alley, and was enclosed on all sides by buildings. Yet there were apartments, and a street name (Pallan Row, the sign said), and two small restaurants, the kind with only eight or nine tables, one of them a Szechwan place, the other nondescript in its Americanized menu; also, a flower stand, boarded up, and what looked like a bit of a warehouse. The place carried an added layer of humidity, as if it had more of the swamp to it than the city.

  I am not normally a wanderer of alleys, but I could not help myself—I had lived in this neighborhood about a year and a half, and in that time had felt I knew every block within about a mile and a half radius. But it was as if I had just found the most wonderful gift in the world, a hidden grotto, a place in New York City that was as yet undiscovered except by, perhaps, the oldest residents. I looked in the windows of the warehouse but could see nothing through the filthy windows.

  All day at work, I asked friends who lived in the general vicinity if they knew about Pallan Row, but only one said that she did. “It used to be where the sweatshops were—highly illegal, too, because when I was a kid, they used to raid them all the time—it was more than bad working conditions, it was white slavery and heroin, all those things. But then,” she added, “so much of this city has a history like that. On the outside, carriage rides and Broadway shows, but underneath, kind of slimy.”

  On Saturday, I convinced Jenny to take a walk with me, but for some reason I couldn’t find the Row; we went to lunch. Afterward, I remembered where I’d led us astray, and we ended up going to have tea at the Chinese restaurant. The menu was ordinary, and the decorations vintage and tacky.

  “Amazing,” Jenny said, “look, honey, the ceiling,” and I glanced up and beheld one of those lovely old tin ceilings with the chocolate candy designs.

  The waitress, who was an older Asian woman, noticed us and came over with some almond cookies.

  “We’re usually empty on weekends,” she said. She glanced up at the tin ceiling, having noticed Jenny’s interest. “Nice, huh? This was part of a speakeasy in the twenties—the cafe next door, too. They say a mobster ran numbers out of the back room. Before that, it was just an icehouse. My husband began renting it in 1954.”

  “That long ago?” Jenny said, taking a bite from a cookie. “It seems like most restaurants come and go around here.”

  “Depends on the rent.” The woman nodded, still looking at the ceiling. “The owner hasn’t raised it a penny in all those years.”

  She glanced at me, then at Jenny. “You’re going to have a baby, aren’t you?”

  Jenny grinned. “How’d you guess?”

  The woman said, “I can see it in your face. You’ll have a boy, I bet.”

  After she left the table, we finished the tea, and just sat for a while. The owner’s wife occasionally peeped through
the round porthole window of the kitchen door, and we smiled at her but shook our heads to indicate that we weren’t in need of service.

  “When the baby comes,” she said, “Mom said she’d loan us money to get a larger place.”

  “Ah, family loans,” I warned her.

  “I know, but we won’t have to pay her back for a few years. Can you believe it? Me, a mother?”

  “And me, a father?” I leaned over and pressed my hand against her stomach. “I wonder what he’s thinking?”

  “Or she. Probably, ‘Get me the hell out of here right now!’ is what it’s thinking.”

  “Babies aren’t ‘its.’”

  “Well, right now it is. It has a will of its own. It probably looks like a little developing tadpole. Something like its father.” She gave my hand a squeeze. I kissed her. When I drew my face back from hers, she had tears in her eyes.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “Oh,” she wiped at her eyes with her napkin, “I’m going to change.”

  “Into what?”

  “No, you know what I mean. I’ve been living too recklessly.”

  “Oh,” I said, and felt a little chill. “That’s all in the past. I love you like crazy, Jen.”

  “I know. I am so lucky,” she said. “Our baby’s lucky to have two screwups like us for parents.”

  Now, it could be that I’m just recalling that we said these words because I want her memory to be sweeter for me than perhaps reality will allow. But we walked back up Second Avenue that Saturday feeling stronger as a couple; and I knew the baby was mine, I just knew it, regardless of the chances against it. We caught a movie, went home and made love, sat up and watched Saturday Night Live. Sunday we took the train out to her mother’s in Stamford, and then as the week was just getting under way, I walked through the doorway of our small sublet to find blood on the faux Oriental rug.

  Yet the door had been locked. That was my first thought. I didn’t see Jenny’s body until I got to the bathroom, which is where her murderer had dragged her, apparently while she was still alive, and then had dropped her in the tub, closed the shower curtain around her. It wasn’t as gruesome as I expected it to be—there was a bullet in her head, behind her left ear, and she was lying face up, so I didn’t see the damage to the back of her scalp. She didn’t even look like Jenny anymore. She looked like a butcher shop meat with a human shape. She looked like some dead woman with whom I had no acquaintance. I was pretty numb, and was thinking of calling the police, when it occurred to me that the killer might still be in the apartment. So I went next door to Helen Connally’s and knocked on the door. Helen, in her sweats, saw my panic, let me in, and made me some tea while we waited for the police. I hated leaving Jenny there, in the tub, for the ten minutes, but if the murderer was still lurking, I had no way of defending myself.

  After the police and the neighbors and Jenny’s mother had picked my brain about the crime, it hit me.

  I had not only lost my partner and lover, but also my only child. I cried for days, or perhaps it was weeks— it was like living, for a time, in a dark cave where there was no hour, no minute, no day, only darkness.

  When I emerged from my stupor and weeping, the police had arrested a suspect in my wife’s murder, and then the mystery unraveled: we had been subletting an apartment from a man who had several such places around the city, and each one was used, occasionally, by the man’s clients as a place of business on certain weekdays for drug dealing. The dealers’ assumption had been that on a given day of the week, no one was home. Best the detectives could tell, Jenny had come home too early on the wrong Tuesday, a drug deal was in progress, and one of the men had killed her as soon as she’d come in the door. I was devastated to think that strangers could be in our apartment; but of course, it wasn’t really ours. The renter of the apartment was arrested; he pointed the finger at a few associates; and within a year, the guilty were behind bars, and I was living in a place off Houston and Sullivan Street, over in the SoHo area. I was seeing, on a friendly basis, Helen Connally, my former neighbor—it was almost as if the tragedy of my wife’s death had given us a basis on which to form a friendship. Helen was thirty-two to my twenty-eight, and, while I knew I would never love her the way I loved Jenny, she was a good friend to me through a most difficult time. We spent a year being slightly good friends, and then we became lovers.

  I was taking some out-of-town friends of ours on an informal sightseeing tour of the Big Apple, and brought them down to little Pallan Row. I thought the Szechuan place would be good for lunch, but when we entered the alley, both it and the cafe were closed; windows were boarded up.

  “Jesus,” I said, “just a year ago, the woman running it told me that they’d had it since the fifties.”

  Helen took my elbow. “C’mon, we can go get sandwiches up at Tivoli. Or,” she turned to the couple we’d brought, “there’s a great deli on Third. You guys like pastrami?”

  Their voices faded into the background as I looked through the section of the restaurant’s window that was clear, and thought I saw my dead wife’s face back along the wall, through the round glass window of the door to the kitchen.

  “Oliver,” Helen said, looking over my shoulder, “what’s up?”

  “Nothing,” I said, still looking at Jenny, her dark hair grown longer, obscuring all but her nose and mouth.

  “It must be something.”

  “It’s just an old place. It was once a speakeasy, back in the twenties. Think of all that’s gone on in there,” I said.

  Jenny’s face, in that round window, staring at me.

  “Cool,” Helen said. She was originally from California, so “cool” and “bummer” had not yet been erased from her vocabulary of irony. She stood back, and her friend Larry whispered something to her.

  I watched Jenny’s face, and noticed that when her hair fell more to the side of her face, there were no eyes in her eye sockets.

  “Let’s go,” Helen whispered. “They want to take a ride on the ferry before it gets dark.”

  “Okay, just a sec,” I said.

  Jenny moved away from the round window.

  My heart was beating fast.

  I assumed that I was hallucinating, but the thought of spending the rest of the afternoon escorting this couple around town when I had just seen my dead wife was absurd. I made an excuse about needing to be by myself—Helen always took this well, and I caught an understanding look from Anne, who nodded. I knew they would go on to a late lunch and talk about how I still hadn’t quite recovered from Jenny’s death; and I knew Helen would act the martyr a bit, because it was so hard to play nurse to me over a woman who had cheated constantly behind my back. I adored Helen for her care and caution around my feelings; I wished them a good afternoon, and stood there, along the Row, watching them, until they had rounded the comer and were out of sight.

  After a few minutes, I took off my shoe and broke the window glass, and tugged at one of the boards until it gave. Within half an hour, I stepped in through the broken window and walked across the dusty floor to the kitchen.

  The kitchen was all long, shiny metal shelves and drawers, pots and pans still piled high. But it was dark, and I saw no one. I walked across the floor, back to the walk-in freezer, and looked through its frosty pane of glass. Although I could see nothing in there, I found myself shivering, even my teeth began chattering, and I had the sudden and uncomfortable feeling that if I did not get out of that kitchen, out of that boarded up restaurant right then, something terrible would happen.

  It didn’t occur to me until I was on the street again that there should’ve been no frost on the glass pane at the walk-in freezer; that, in fact, there was no electricity to the entire building, perhaps to the entire block.

  Helen noticed, over the next few days, that I was becoming nervous. We sat across from each other in our favorite park, me with the Times, and her with a paperback; I looked up, and she was watching me. Another day, we went to a coffee shop, and sh
e mentioned to me that my knees, under the table, were shaking slightly. She said this with some seriousness, as if shaking knees were an indicator of some deeper problem. But I doubted myself then, and I did not want to talk about seeing my dead wife in the Chinese restaurant kitchen on Pallan Row. Finally, my restlessness turned nocturnal, and I tossed and turned in my sleep. Helen, sleeping over, finally sat up in bed at four in the morning and flicked on the bedside lamp. Her eyes were bloodshot.

  “You haven’t slept a full night for two days,” she said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  I spent about an hour dodging the issue, until finally, as she pushed and pushed, I told her about seeing Jenny.

  “She was blind,” Helen said, speaking to me like I was a lying twelve-year-old.

  “Not blind. She had no eyes. I felt she could see me, anyway. She was staring at me. She just had no eyes.”

  “And you went in there and no one was there …”

  “But the freezer. Why would it be going?”

  Helen shrugged. “I’m going to make a drink. You want something?”

  At five-thirty a.m., she and I had vodka martinis, and went and sat out on the fire escape as all of Manhattan awoke, as the sky turned several shades of violet before becoming the blank light of day.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I said, sipping and feeling drunk very quickly. “I don’t believe that the dead can rise or any of that.”

  “What do you believe?”

  I watched a burly man lift crates out of the back of his truck down in the street. “I believe in what I see. I saw her. I really saw her.”

  “Assuming,” she said, “that it was Jenny. Assuming that the freezer was running on its own energy. Assuming you saw what you saw. Assuming all those things as givens, what does it mean?”